USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights.
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Sunday, April 26, 2015

Poor
Dog Group The Murder Ballad (1938),
performed by Jessica Emmanuel and Jesse Saler, with music by Jelly Roll Morton
/ the performance I saw was on Friday, April 24, 2015 at Los Angeles’ Redcat
(Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall

We
have music historian and archivist Alan Lomax to thanks for the recording by
the legendary self-declared “creator” of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder
Ballad,” a raunchy, salty, tale of a woman’s love and her murder of another
woman who has taken “her man,” and who is later jailed for life, describing a heated
lesbian sexual encounter within a prison bed.

Jelly Roll (born Ferdinand LaMothe) first
sang the song within a New Orleans Storyville house of prostitution where we
worked as a piano player and singer in his youth. Lomax found him in a small
Washington, D.C. bar, where we worked as bartender, piano-player and bouncer in
the late 1930s, a low point in his career, a few years before his death. Plying
the now alcoholic jazz legend with liquor and friendly conversation, Lomax had
planned for a short recording session for the Library of Congress, which grew
into over eight hours of talk, singing, and playing by Jelly Roll. In those
sessions, the singer was convinced by Lomax to perform the violent, sexually
vulgar song the way it was originally performed, a piece in such questionable
taste that the Library did not release it until 2005. Today it’s recognized as
a masterpiece of early American jazz.

The immensely talented Los Angeles-based theater-performance
Poor Dog Group took the song, just as Morton had recorded it, and set it to a
riveting dance performance by Jessica Emmanuel, along with occasional interactions
by Jesse Saler. If it appears to be a simple theatrical convention, the way
Emmanuel twists and turns her body in ecstasy and horror throughout gives the
work a new sense of urgency that has to be seen to be appreciated. Let me just
say that the 45-minute The Murder Ballad
(1938)—first performed by this group at Redcat in the New Original Works
festival in 2012 and revived this past week at the same theater—was utterly
revelatory.

The work, as originally performed by Morton,
places itself in a strange situation with regard to gender, in part because its
story of a powerfully sexual woman is sung with a steady metronome-like accompaniment—which
only reiterates the inevitability of the narrative it relates—by an assertive,
yet time-worn voice of a male singer.

If you don’t leave my
fucking man aloneIf you don’t leave my
fucking man aloneYou won’t know what way that
you will go home

I’ll cut your throat and
drink your fucking blood like wineBitch, I’ll cut your fucking
throat and drink you blood like wineBecause I want you to know
he’s a man of mine

Emmanuel uses the occasion to wring out her soul in whirling, leaning
motions forward and backwards. Dressed only in a pair of scanty panties and a
loosely-fitting white top sheath, she becomes the personification of
simultaneous threat and regret, a forceful ogre who is at the edge of
desperation for her man’s neglect, reminding me a little of the position of the
jilted Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria
Rusticana, the opera I saw a few hours later. But while the betrayed Sicilian
woman causes the death of her former lover, the woman of Morton’s ballad
actually shoots the other woman dead, for which she is sentenced to life in
prison.

What’s interesting is that the narrative,
at this point, shifts from the first person to the more objective third. The “I”
is transformed into a “she,” which further isolates the wronged woman:

She said, open your legs, you
dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between the thighsShe said I killed that bitch
because she fucked my manShe said I killed that bitch
because she fucked my manShe said I killed that bitch
because she fucked my man

—the
trinity of reiteration driving the home both the cause and effect, “Policeman
grabbed her and took her to jail.” And for several more stanzas the work
remains in the third person, as she is brought to trial and sentenced.

It
is only when she returns to the subject of sex that the first person returns,
creating an even odder relationship to the male-telling of her story:

I can’t have a man, so a
woman is my next betI can’t have a man in here;
woman is my next betShe said to be a good-looking
mama: baby, I’ll get you yet

It
shifts back to the third person immediately as the sex actually occurs, but
changes soon after, creating an even deeper sense of sexual confusion as the poem
recounts those very issues arising in the woman herself:

She said, I could learn to
love you like a did that boyShe said, I should learn to
love you like I did that boyTo play with my thing like
that is pleasure like a toy

Every morning I want you to
give me some of this good cunt you’ve gotEvery morning I want you to
give me some of this good cunt you’ve gotBecause it sure is fine, it is
good and hot.

Presumably, this purposeful confusion of
gender here is why the company decided to bring Jesse Saler, a male dressed in a
jockstrap, on stage, as a somewhat effeminate surrogate, in opposition to the
tall and statuesque Emmanuel, to symbolically play the other woman of whom the
ballad now sings:

I want you to screw me, screw
me like a dogScrew me behind, sweet bitch,
screw me like a dogWhen it gets good, I want to
holler out like a hog

And from this
point on, the narrative voice returns to the first person, as the murderer declares
her sorrow for her acts (“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry to my heart.”) and finally
turns to prayer (“I pray and pray and pray and pray and pray.”), facing her
final destination: “a box in the prison yard.”

It is the very crudeness of the repeated
words that creates the intensity of the ballad about a woman who sees sex from
a point of view which was then stereotypical that of a man, and sung by a man
(almost a boy when Morton first sang it). In the end the narrative encourages
us to be both enchanted by its honesty and disgusted by the events it
describes, while finding ourselves somewhat seduced by the fierceness of its
sexuality if appalled by its lurid details. In short, it has everything than an
epic American work has to have: innocence, sex, revenge, violence, guilt,
regret and personal salvation! I had a great time.